What I actually don't like about Brand New Day

I didn't care much about the whole One More Day/Brand New Day scenario, not really. Never did read much Spider-Man, nor cared a whole lot about the character other than as part of the background in the Marvel titles I did read. So, MJ or not, public persona or not, didn't make a lot of difference to me.

However, it was still something I found a little bothersome.

Because it seemed to be a strike at something I'd always really liked about Marvel Comics. Something that differentiated them from DC, in my mind.

See, in the Marvel Universe, if you read it in a comic, it was part of the official story. No matter how stupid, no matter how lame, no matter how much it conflicted with everything we knew about the character in question, it happened. (Well, unless it happened in an issue of What If?, but that was explicitly out of continuity. The out-of-continuity was even in the title! It was consigned to its own little corner of the comic lineup.)

Whereas DC, on the other hand...well, they always did have the imaginary stories, but those were usually identified as such so I won't complain about them (apart from the fact that they occurred within the pages of otherwise-in-continuity titles). But DC liked Crises. They liked to change their whole universe(s) every so often. I understand that they were doing it in an attempt to simplify, to make a continuity workable after however-many decades of stories.

But damn, it makes it hard to get interested in any particular character when you never know whether that character will "make the cut" the next time the company decides to reorganize. Why invest the emotional energy (insofar as that can apply to fictional characters) in them when they may not be around in the long run? Why pay attention to storylines, team-ups, partnerships, relationships when they may be overwritten on a whim?

Well, I've grown to like the DC universe well enough that I'm willing to take that chance, at least for some titles and characters. But the DC Universe does seem, to me, to be awfully unstable, at least in narrative terms. I notice a personal reluctance to pay too much attention to what's going on, especially when "change is in the air" (which is, what, all the time these days?).

Marvel, on the other hand, has generally embraced their Silver Age weirdness and so forth. Apart from the in-my-opinion-unnecessary sliding time scale, of course. Brand New Day, however, comes unfortunately close to being something I really don't care for. And I think the company recognizes this--thus all the commentary from the company about how "all the stories you read as a kid still happened, they just weren't married."

So, Spider-Man and his changing marital status isn't really something that's going to affect my own comic-reading experience, because I don't care that much about that particular character. However, it's a sign that yes, Marvel is willing to use that sort of rewriting of character history, and I can't help but think that the next time, it'll be someone I do care about.

Because I am that kind of annoying comic fan, apparently.